Teachers on the Edge

25 September 2012

Over 100 physics teachers gathered in Trinity College Dublin for the 12th annual Frontiers Conference on 21st-22nd September. This event, organized by the Institute of Physics in Ireland, combines cutting edge physics with practical activities for use in the classroom.

Key note speakers included Belfast born Steve Myers, Director of Accelerators at CERN, Karen Bultitude of UCL on Gender Aware Teaching Practice and Martyn Wheeler from Leicester on WiiMote Physics.

From Trinity’s School of Physics, Peter Gallagher spoke on Tuning in the Radio Sun, Jonathan Coleman on Nanoparticles and Matthias Möbius on Granular Flows.

There were also tours of the Walton Exhibition and the Monck Observatory in TCD.

A pre-event special event was a tour of rare science books at Marsh’s Library, which was opened specially for the conference delegates. Marsh's Library was built in 1701 and was the first public library in Ireland. It houses almost 30,000 rare books, in a beautiful building, virtually unchanged in three centuries.

On display in this exhibition are original works by Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Huygens, Francis Bacon, DesCartes, Robert Boyle, as well as a third edition of Newton's Principia.